Josh Rubin, the Soho-based designer behind the Web site Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting, said that Pattern Recognition didn’t so much change his behavior or buying habits as it provided a "label" for his madness. Mr. Rubin said he experiences a "gut response" to logos.

"I’ll be razor-blading off a label and think, ‘That’s so Cayce Pollard,’" he said. "Like the other day, I cut out the embroidery of a logo off my snowboarding bag. It was just this small company’s name in cursive with a little swooshy thing, and it looked so bad, it just offended me."

Mr. Rubin’s personal nemesis is the revived logo Von Dutch, recently popularized by the likes of Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake. "I’m not sure I’ve gotten physically ill or wanted to vomit … but I don’t understand it," he said. "It doesn’t resonate or make sense to me in any way. I definitely have the recoiling thing with Von Dutch."

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Really the only way out of the brandosphere, said Mr. Rubin the coolhunter, is "buying your own goat. Or moving to Amish country." by Maureen Tkacik